The Internet has allowed companies to exploit electronic communications to engage in Business-to-Business (B2B) transactions with other companies. B2B transactions involve conducting business such as buying and selling goods and services over the Internet with trading or business partners. Trading partners are businesses that exchange goods or services for value. For example, trading partners can be a manufacturer and a raw goods supplier that supplies the manufacturer.
In B2B environments trading partners usually have trading agreements established with each other. Trading partner agreements generally cover a wide range of issues which include the enforcement of contracts, protocols, and service level agreements (SLAs) on B2B transactions. A business typically utilizes one or more trading partner management systems for managing B2B transactions with its trading partners. These systems are generally directed to defining, configuring, executing, and monitoring the business's B2B transactions and adherence of those transactions to trading partner agreements.
However, in many instances trading partners have implemented disparate systems to diversify the number of available B2B channels for B2B transactions. Because these disparate systems are deployed among trading partners, trading partner collaboration management is difficult with conventional trading partner management systems. Also, conventional trading partner management systems generally do not provide a convenient and efficient way to establish trading agreements and B2B processes with trading partners with differing supply chain models.
Another problem with these conventional trading partner management systems is that they usually do not provide support for common collaboration processes and business rules in the context of heterogeneity of B2B connectivity protocols and standards. Another drawback of conventional trading partner management systems is that B2B integrations with small and medium sized business partners that have extremely limited B2B capabilities and IT budgets are difficult to establish. Further, conventional trading partner management systems generally do not provide an improvement in the quality of B2B data in the face of many manual processes for message creation and the need for conformance to several business rules and trading partner agreements.